Esn's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Fred's Birthday Surprise]

Mmm...

As much as I love most of your work, this joke is so old that it's really anticlimatic. By far your best moment in humour was in "The Performance Artist", where the humour was a lot more subtle than it was here and most of the jokes were mentioned in passing and not dwelled on (which I think makes them a lot funnier than when it's really obvious that there's a lead-up to them). Your graphics and sound are excellent, but I think you need to find that strain of humour that you had in "The Performance Artist" again and apply it to a different topic, because quite frankly it's a lot funnier when the joke isn't the entire raison d'etre for the flash's existence (in "The Performance Artist", the flash pretends to be a serious take on the subject, which makes the humour when it does come a lot more unexpected and funnier).
I still liked a lot of things about this (the sleeping seniors were great), but the humour factor was really missing a lot of the time.

["The Mustache Contest"]

10s all around!

Wow, this is so refreshingly different from everything else! I liked the music especially - it went with the quietly funny feel of the flash so well. Everything looked really good, and I can't think of a way that you could've improved it - not because it's outstandingly awesome and ambitious, but because it does exactly what it tries to do with no missteps. That's certainly worth some praise.

I'm very curious about one thing, though: I notice that all of the lines have at least 3 frames of animation that they go through. Did you draw all of them manually (did you redraw all of the objects three times)? Or did you use some blending program to create intermediate stages between the two extreme frames?

BabyBirdComics responds:

all the graphics had a 5X (drawing) cycle in them and they were set to loop.

[Afterliving]

Oh, what the heck - perfect 10!

Although the graphics were a little rough in a few places, the sheer scope of this animation as well as its execution made it a work of absolute genious. It nearly made me cry more than once. Excellent job, submitter - this one's going into my favourites.

Anybody who liked this should also check out "Los Dias Sin Dias".

soccerlord8 responds:

Did you hold up one of those white cards with the 10 score on it? If you did, that kicks.

[Lonely Cat]

Quite good.

I followed the "users who liked this flash also liked..." link on Sumo the Bamboo Man by Ola Bergner. This animation gives me a nice feeling... the only slightly annoying thing is that the voice is so high-pitched that it's sometimes hard to hear what's being sung.

Otherwise it's quite good (and quite tame, so not everyone will like it).

[A Men's Room Monologue]

Excellent and true!

All of this is so true! You forgot one category, though - the men who make loud groaning/satisfaction sounds in the stall while doing #2. Think of them as German Generals. :P I'd recommend adding that in if you ever think about updating this flash!
You also neglected to mention how dirty the toilet seats frequently are...

In any case, this is very funny. The graphics aren't too shabby either.

[Royce Biggins Ep. 3]

Damn, that's weird.

Excellent animations, style and music (one tip, though - the tiger thing doesn't move across the ground fast enough. Its legs look like they're sliding). I only wish that there was a bit more of a story, like in "Wall Lunch". Still, this is better than episodes 1 and 2. You can do some amazing stuff with flash - I loved the colours here.

Keep making more - I have the feeling that you're going to create something really amazing some day if you ever decide to start working on a BIG project.

[Objectionable Apparatus]

Astounding!

I rarely give 10s in so many areas, but this flash certainly deserves it. I doubt that it'll get the score it deserves on NG because it's simply too hard to understand for most people - too many complicated metaphors and such. Heck, your best-scoring flash "PUSTOTA" took me about 10 times of watching to fully understand (it now sits on my list of favorites, just as this flash will when I'm done writing this review). While these visual metaphors add to the quality of your animations, the simple fact of the matter is that for the majority of people it's simply too much intellectual effort to bother figuring it out, and even those of us who do figure it out aren't clear on some things. I'd suggest that you put an in-depth explanation of your movie somewhere (in your comments perhaps, or put a link to it if it's on your website), just so that those who don't have time to watch it 10 times can understand what it's about. Trust me, I think almost everyone here WANTS to know and will appreciate it when they do, but many simply don't have the time to unravel such a complicated animation themselves. As I'm writing this I'm still not sure of the meaning of about 85% of what I saw... though it was very pretty (in a dark way).

As for the other aspects - excellent style, storyboarding, graphics, music... everything. This might even be your best flash to date, which is really saying something. I really can't see a single flaw with anything except the inaccessibility of the way the story is presented (and the low sound quality, but it's still not too bad... I think I'll go watch the higher-quality version on your website).

[The Little Girl]

Very atmospheric.

That was very well done - good narration, nice concept, good music, fairly good graphics. Great atmosphere, and a wonderfully dark story. There was one thing I didn't really like, though, and that was that there was practically no animation - everything was stationary and all of the movements were created by moving the pieces or shrinking/expanding something. That's basically why this gets an "8" instead of a higher score.